By Chris Hedges.
Donald Trump is part of the peculiar breed Herman Melville described in
his novel “The Confidence-Man,” in which the main character uses protean
personas, flattery and lies to gain the confidence of his fellow
passengers to fleece them on a Mississippi River steamboat. “Confidence
men,” as Melville understood, are an inevitable product of the amorality
of capitalism and the insatiable lust for wealth, power and empire that
infects American society. Trump’s narcissism, his celebration of
ignorance—which he like all confidence men confuses with innocence—his
megalomania and his lack of empathy are pathologies nurtured by the
American landscape. They embody the American belief, one that Mark Twain
parodied in “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” F. Scott Fitzgerald excoriated in “The
Great Gatsby” and William Faulkner portrayed in the depraved Snopes
clan, that it does not matter in the crass commercialism of American
society how you obtain wealth and power. They are their own justifications.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trump-the-quintessential-american/